By Saumya Liyanage –

Prof. Saumya Liyanage

Shocking news

The Sri Lankan academic community and his close friends were devastated by the shocking news received abruptly on midday of 21^st of April 2025. My friend, Milinda Pathiraja called me and said that Harshana had passed away due to a heart attack. I was with my colleagues, Anasuya, Chamanee and Ranga at the staff boardroom when I received the call. I lost my words for a moment.

All these people around me had some sort of a connection to Harshana and to his academic aura. Harshana taught these young academics in developing their academic careers at several occasions during their postgraduate years. He supervised their theses with me while encouraging them to publish their academic works. With the sad news received and the painful silence created around us, Ranga showed me an email he received when he finally got through his MPhil degree. Harshana has sent this email in January 2021 soon after Ranga had successfully defended his MPhil thesis.

Harshana Rambukwella

‘Congratulations Ranga about submitting!

I think your thesis is well conceptualized, researched and written. I will be happy to meet and discuss your ideas further and I will be happy to help you develop a research proposal in English to apply for PhD positions overseas. Best, Harshana’ (Rambukwella 2021).

This short essay does not intend to capture the vast array of writings Harshana has produced and the service he rendered to many over a short period of time of his academic and professional career. Beginning from the University of Hong Kong where he completed his PhD and worked as an honorary Assistant Professor in English at the School of English and later working at the New York University, Abu Dhabi until 2025, Harshana immensely contributed to enhance academic culture locally and internationally. The intention of this paper is therefore to recollect and honour a close friend and a great teacher who helped many postgraduates and the academic community in Sri Lanka and elsewhere to uphold and sustain the academic integrity and honesty of our higher education. Harshana continued his academic career as an administrator, teacher, researcher and a writer who was keen in enhancing and developing the Sri Lankan higher education sector and protecting the free education system in Sri Lanka. His unwavering support to develop academic programs and research in the fields of Social Sciences, Humanities and Performing Arts cannot be ever forgotten.

Politics

I first met Harshana through my friend Ruwanthie de Chickera in early 2015. At the time, I was writing my first book in English and I was seeking someone who can look at my work. I initially approached Ruwanthie and without hesitation, she introduced me to Harshana. Harshana’s meticulous attention to my writing and his comments helped me to refine my book. Since then he was a close friend who encouraged me to develop my writing skills. He was a keen observer of my academic works, a regular attendee at theatres and cinemas and shared his ideas with me. Since then Harshana was a regular resource person of postgraduate seminars delivered at the Faculty of Graduate Studies, UVPA Colombo. He chaired sessions at two international conferences I convened at the UVPA Colombo and enriched the research culture among academics and students.

Harshana was a rebel and a keen political and social reader who stood for the protection of free education and the quality and integrity of Sri Lankan higher education sector. His active participation during FUTA protest to demand 6% of GDP on education was paramount. When I was unlawfully ejected from my position as the Dean of the Faculty of Graduate Studies at UVPA Colombo and deprived of my academic career, he was one of the few academics who stood for me and organized a press gathering to reveal the unjust and unlawful act of the UVPA administration.  Last time I met Harshana was early this year when he visited Colombo for a short period with his family. We met at the Otter’s club during lunch time. He talked about the rich academic culture at New York University in Abu Dhabi and also mentioned about collaborating with the theatre department where Wole Soyinka is a professor. We had many ideas and projects to realize in the coming months.

The uniqueness of Harshana’s academic career was his ability to work bilingually and working in both Sinhala and English speaking academic communities in Sri Lanka. He was a keen reader of Sinhala literature, films, theatre and other cultural narratives and was able to dissect their minute details and underline ideological assumptions to read how the Sri Lankan society and democracy have been evolving through these cultural narratives. Harshana’s dedication to uplift the bilinguality and the importance of writing academic works in both languages was a great privilege for academics who write in Sinhala. Also he has encouraged many of them to step into academic writing in English. Harshana’s ability to guide and supervise in both languages benefited many local researchers who produce theses in Sinhala language.

Poetics

Harshana worked with us at the Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of the Visual and Performing Arts (UVPA), Colombo as an external supervisor for MPhil and PhD programs, and worked as a reviewer of theses and as a resource person of the Short Course on Research that I initiated. I personally remember that a few of my MPhil researchers of whom I have supervised theses, have been benefited through Harshana’s academic expertise.  I must mention that my international postgraduate student Lyudmyla Honcharova, a Ukrainian student who conducted her research on Sri Lankan martial arts and actor training had the opportunity to work with Harshana during her thesis writing. With Harshana’s guidance and his mentorship, she successfully completed her thesis and received the MPhil degree. At this moment, we all at the Department of Theatre Ballet and Modern Dance and the postgraduate cohort at the Faculty of Graduate Studies, UVPA Colombo are in grief, remembering his valuable contribution to enrich the research culture at UVPA, Colombo.

During his tenure as the director of the Postgraduate Institute of English, Open University, Harshana played a pivotal role in bringing diverse research communities together. Drawing various research centres and funding bodies together, Harshana organized several research symposiums and forums to cultivate a sustainable research culture in the university sector. I still remember, that some of my undergraduate students who had the potential of becoming future researchers had the opportunity to present their research works at the sessions organized by the PGIE led by Harshana. His meticulous attention to emerging academics and researchers had invaluable support and feedback while providing critical reflective analysis

Harshana’s work, The Politics and Poetics of Authenticity: A Cultural Genealogy of Sinhala Nationalism published in 2018, was a milestone in analysing Sinhala Nationalism and its transformations through various key proponents representing various decades. Harshana showed us how Sinhala literary culture sustained the Sinhala authentic cultural narratives through selected novels and stories. Two thousand years of hydraulic cultural heritage and the glory of Sinhala supremacy according to Harshana, has been changing in the post-war Sri Lanka. A new mode of authenticity has been established with the political changes taking place after the end of war against LTTE. His analysis showed us how Ravana cult has been emerging in the post-war Sri Lanka as a novel authenticity discourse overlapping the established Sinhala authentic culture propagated through city-country divide. Thus, Harshana argued that Ravana mytho-historical stories have idealized ‘a twenty-first-century Sinhala nation with advanced technological capabilities’ (Rambukwella, 2018, p. 149)

Harshana’s writing surpassed various textual narratives from social political texts to literary and other creative narratives to define the social and cultural registers in the contemporary Sri Lankan society. He was keen on studying such daily lives of human behaviours, their dialogic narratives and how these narratives are being developed and circulated through various political premises. Harshana enjoyed reading and dissecting aesthetic, dramatic, filmic, poetic and literary texts to reveal how the social, democratic and political narratives are reflected in those discourses. We collaborated together in the recent publication, Democracy and Democratisation in Sri Lanka: Paths, Trends and Imaginations (2023) edited by Professor Jayadeva Uyangoda where Harshana’s chapter reflects how Sri Lankan democracy and democratization process evolves through Sinhala novels and other prose. Harshana brought Sinhala literature to the global arena through his meticulous reading in Sinhala and writing about them in English to reach a wider audience in the country and beyond. Yet, Harshana is no more to do this task today.

Departure

It is very rare for an institution or a society to develop such a vigorous and critical thinker. Harshana was a product of Dharmaraja College Kandy, a graduate from the Department of English, University of Peradeniya, a PhD holder from the University of Hong Kong, and a visiting professor in America, Germany and elsewhere. His continual engagement with the Sri Lankan literati and global scholarship, his struggle against the indoctrination in higher education and the decline of liberal arts education in the country and beyond and his belief on the preservation of free education have made him such a unique personality. Yet, Harshana suddenly left us like a thin vapour, leaving his humanity and poetic life behind. We believe that Harshana will continue to intervene our lives and works through his writings and will remain with us until we complete the task that he envisioned to do in his short life.

References

Rambukwella, Harshana. 2018. The Politics and Poetics of Authenticity: A Cultural Genecology of Sinhala Nationalism. UCL Press University College London.

Rambukwella, Harshana. Letter to Ranga Manupriya. 2021. “Congratulations Ranga about Submitting!” Email, January 9, 2021.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Himansi Dehigama for proofreading this manuscript.

*Saumya Liyanage (PhD), Professor in Drama and Theatre, Dept. of Theatre Ballet and Modern Dance, Faculty of Dance and Drama, University of the Visual and Performing Arts, Colombo, Sri Lanka.